PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) – A federal appeals court has upheld the conviction of Mohamed Mohamud, the Somali American sentenced to 30 years in prison for plotting to bomb downtown Portland during the annual lighting of a Christmas tree.

The truck bomb was a fake given to him in 2010 by undercover FBI agents posing as terrorists.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Monday that a U.S. District Court judge properly rejected Mohamud’s claim of entrapment. The 50-page opinion states the government’s conduct was quite aggressive, but the sting fell short of a due process violation.

The court also rejected an assertion that the warrantless surveillance of his foreign communications violated his constitutional rights.

More background here and here including comments from Mohamed’s mother:

Mohamud’s mother, Mariam Barre, said she was very disappointed with the sentence.

“We are Muslim, and our religion does not to kill innocent people,” she said to a group of reporters and photographers outside the courthouse.

But…Muslims do not consider non-Muslim innocent nor any Muslim who does not abide by the sharia and believe in jihad. And double Mo’ said this about his own parents in a martyrdom video:

On Nov. 4, the court documents say, Mohamud made a video in the presence of one of the undercover agents, putting on clothes he described as “Sheik Osama style:” a white robe, red and white headdress, and camouflage jacket.

He read a statement speaking of his dream of bringing “a dark day” on Americans and blaming his family for thwarting him, according to the court documents:

“To my parents who held me back from Jihad in the cause of Allah. I say to them … if you — if you make allies with the enemy, then Allah’s power … will ask you about that on the day of judgment, and nothing that you do can hold me back …

Prosecutors on Sunday charged Mustafa Barimac, 26, with the felony. His bail was set at $500,000, cash only. He made his initial court appearance Monday morning. His next court date is scheduled for Jan. 4 before Associate Circuit Judge John Borbonus.

Creve Coeur police say Barimac made the comments on Nov. 25, the day after Thanksgiving, to co-workers at an auto detailing firm, Teph Seal, at 11830 Olive Boulevard.

He told co-workers he was affiliated with ISIS and even showed them a tattoo he claimed was an ISIS tattoo.

“He threatened to co-workers that he could place one phone call and have the place blown up,” Creve Coeur Detective Cory Mueller said in court papers.

Mueller said it was hard to pin down why Barimac made the threat. Mueller said it could have been due to the face that Barimac was a detailer who was angry about his paycheck and job responsibilities. Mueller said Barimac thought he had been promised a promotion to a low-level manager with a pay hike, and that didn’t happen as quickly as he had wanted.

Workers didn’t notify police until a week later.

“At first, he was a big talker,” Mueller said. “But as time went on and he started adding on this ISIS bit and showed the tattoo, it made people take him more seriously. The statements built up over time.”

A week after the ISIS comment, police in Creve Coeur were notified and they began working with the FBI. Police conducted constant surveillance of Barimac, including at Barimac’s parents’ home where he lives in the 300 block of Southhampton Drive, near Jefferson Barracks park in south St. Louis County. Police in Creve Coeur brought a dog that can detect explosives to the business and searched it Saturday, the same day Barimac was arrested at another business in St. Louis they followed him to.

No bombs or bomb-making equipment were found at the business, on him, his car or at his parents’ home, police say. His tattoo “ended up being in Arabic, along the lines of, ‘Only God or Allah can judge me,'” Mueller said.

Barimac admitted to police that he made it up, police say. He agreed that the comments would reach the entire workforce of about 25 people, Mueller said. A few weeks before the ISIS threat, Mueller said, Barimac told co-workers he had access to firearms and if another issue came up he “could come to the business and take care of all Teph Seal employees.” Mueller said police didn’t find out about the firearms threat until workers reported the ISIS threat Friday. Police say they found no social media site associated with Barimac, except an old MySpace site that he doesn’t maintain.

Court records do not indicate if Barimac has an attorney yet. His parents could not be reached for comment. Mueller said they speak limited English. He said Barimac, a Bosnian, has been in the St. Louis area since high school and lived in Iowa before that. The FBI is developing an intelligence file on Barimac, but he was not on their radar before this report, authorities say.

In Missouri, the crime of making a terrorist threat is punishable by up to seven years in prison and a $5,000 fine. The charges say Barimac made the threat “for the purpose of frightening ten or more people.”

“We handled it pretty swiftly,” Mueller said. “It was a situation we didn’t want to sit on. We wanted to get him into custody. For all we know, he could have posed a significant threat while out there.”

Oddly, Kim Bell of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch doesn’t include a picture of the Muslim terrorist, but includes the description of an unrelated crime and photo of that suspect in at the end of her article. Obfuscate much?

Mohammad Qatanani is imam at the Islamic Center of Passaic County. Immigration officials have been fighting to deport him since 2006, alleging he failed to disclose connections with Hamas when he applied for permanent residency. When he came to the United States 10 years earlier, he claimed he had never been arrested or belonged to any terrorist groups.

That history makes Qatanani subject to deportation, DHS says.

Tuesday’s hearing centered on Qatanani’s October 1993 arrest and conviction by an Israeli military court on charges he provided support to Hamas. He claims Israeli authorities detained him and never charged him.

“No lawyer prior to 2008 ever told me that I had a conviction,” Qatanani said.

U.S. Immigration Judge Judge Alberto Reifkohl ruled in 2008 that the bulk of the evidence and testimony introduced by the Department of Homeland Security was not credible and granted Qatanani permanent residency, better known as a “green card.”

The Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals sent the case back to Reifkohl in October 2009, finding that he erred rejecting the credibility of evidence and government testimony.

In addition, DHS attorneys bolstered some of the evidence obtained from Israeli officials, including two confessions which include statements Qatanani made about his Hamas connection. Three additional witness statements came from people who told Israeli officials that Qatanani recruited them to join Hamas

Qatanani claims he never was given translations of the Hebrew-language Israeli court records and never knew what they alleged. “There is no confession to my understanding” Qatanani said Tuesday.

He also disputed that the signatures on the documents were his, saying instead they were “similar” to his signature. DHS evidence was able to match the fingerprints on the documents to Qatanani.

…

It’s impossible for Qatanani to get around the fact he lied when he said he never had been arrested, Brundage said.

No ruling was issued before the hearing recessed. It is scheduled to resume next month.

Funeral services for Abdul Razak Ali Artan, the Ohio State student who carried out Monday’s attack on campus, were held Thursday afternoon. Artan was shot multiple times by a police officer moments after the attack began.

Over 100 people attended Artan’s funeral at the Ibnu Taymiyah mosqueon the city’s North Side. As is traditional, Artan’s body was washed before it was brought into the prayer hall, where community members prayed over him.

Due to the ongoing investigation, Artan’s family did not speak with the media, but Ahmed Ahmed, the mosque’s director, spoke with Artan’s mother on Wednesday.

“I believed my son would die one day, but I was not expecting him to die this soon,” Artan’s mother reportedly told Ahmed. “God gave him to me and he took [him] away.”

Ahmed says she was shocked to learn her son, a straight-A student and recent Columbus State Community College graduate, had carried out the attack. She says that morning, Artan had just taken his younger siblings to school.

Artan’s mother, he says, doesn’t think her son is guilty.

“She’s waiting for the investigation to conclude to see what they come up with, but she still believes that her son is innocent,” Ahmed said.

Saleem was intending to meet the twelve-year-old girl he had been chatting with online, but instead, Saleem met Sheriff’s deputies waiting for him and 21 others in a child sex sting operation. He was detained at 9:35 pm and booked at one-in-the-morning.

This event surely had erased much happier times for Saleem. It was only a few months earlier that he had met with his fellow CAIR leaders to discuss organizational strategy.

At the end of the two years, Saleem will be responsible for $36,500 in incarceration costs and another $1000 in fines and fees.

Following his stay, he may have an issue finding a job as a ‘sexual offender.’ He probably will not be able to rely on his parents, as both their jobs deal with youth, his father being a pediatrician and his mother being a school teacher. And it is doubtful his Psychology degree from UCF will help, except to demonstrate that he was more suited as a patient than a student.

Also, his job at the Orlando office of CAIR has been taken up by Rasha Mubarak, a past organizer of anti-Semitic, anti-Israel demonstrations. For CAIR to bring back a convicted pedophile would certainly be viewed as a lot worse than the fact that they hired him in the first place.

However, Ahmad Saleem’s predicament did and does hurt CAIR. While some people are willing to overlook CAIR’s association with international terrorism and even defend it, no one wishes to be associated with the stigma of sexual predation and deviancy.

Another Orlando CAIR representative who hurt the group this year was CAIR-Florida’s Orlando Outreach Coordinator, Ruanne Zein. In May, Zein posted onto her Facebook page an offensive Holocaust joke depicting a smiling Adolf Hitler with a sandwich in front of him along with the caption, “The best Kosher deli sandwiches are made in the Reichstag. I love the Jews!”

As a result of this author’s exposing Zein’s posting, she is no longer a staff member at CAIR. The difference between her and Saleem, though, is that she gets to go home, and Saleem gets maybe a phone call and visiting hours.

Saleem’s conviction is yet another example of CAIR’s disreputable track record of hiring controversial figures who would later serve jail terms, usually for offenses related to terror and violence.

Sexual predation can now officially be added to the list of sordid activities coming from CAIR representatives.

A reader contacted us to report that she had found the Facebook profile of the alleged killer (here it is, but don’t expect it to stay up long).

“He looks lifeless. His stare is blank. All I can see is hatred. But when I scrolled down, I saw a shocking post. He posted a picture of a vicious wolf that is holding a fragile white woman. It looks like he is about to rape the women and then rip her apart. Just like he did it to his victim,” Lena Kirschbaum told us in an email.

As you can see below, the Facebook profile picture is identical to the image of “Hussein K.” that was released by police to the media.

After Kirschbaum began posting a link to the Facebook profile in comment sections with the words, “Maria’s murderer,” her account was banned by Facebook. The reason? She had violated “hate speech rules” by posting the picture of the killer.

Kirschbaum was banned despite the fact that the picture had already been circulated in news reports about the incident, albeit blurred or blacked out over the perpetrator’s eyes.

The ban is chilling yet unsurprising given how Facebook is openly working with the German government to censor criticism of the migrant crisis under the guise of preventing “hate speech”.

In a related story, the European Union is now demanding that Facebook, Twitter and YouTube censor “illegal hate speech” and “fake news” within 24 hours of it being reported.

Apparently, accurately reporting the identity of a rapist murderer after his image has already been publicly revealed now constitutes “hate speech,” according to Facebook.

A 22-year-old man accused of plotting to attack the U.S. Capitol in support of the Islamic State group shouted out his support of Allah and called the court system “rigged” on Monday after being sentenced to 30 years in prison.

U.S. District Judge Sandra Beckwith, who voiced doubts about Christopher Lee Cornell’s claims of remorse and commitment against promoting “jihadist” violence, also sentenced the suburban Cincinnati man to lifetime probation after his sentence with monitoring and sharp restrictions on his computer use.

As he was led out of the courtroom in shackles, Cornell, who earlier offered apologies while asking the judge to give him “a second chance,” criticized the court system and shouted: “Allah is in control, not this judge!”

The FBI arrested Cornell in January 2015. In August, he pleaded guilty to three charges, including attempted murder of U.S. officials and employees. Court documents show Cornell said he wanted to attack during President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address.

Cornell’s attorneys argued for a shorter sentence, saying he has rejected “radical Islamic propaganda” while embracing peaceful Islamic religious philosophy. They said he wants to be a productive citizen.

They described Cornell as a lonely, depressed youth who became self-radicalized, living “a fantasy life behind a computer screen.” They say he was steered by a paid FBI confidential informant.

The attorneys also said Cornell’s plot was infeasible and likely reflected a mental condition that distorted reality. They said Cornell told the informant he planned to wear a turban, black camouflage and sandals, enter the Capitol building through the front door and take aim at Obama while he spoke.

The FBI arrested him in a western Cincinnati suburban gun shop parking lot, saying he had just bought two M-15 semi-automatic rifles and 600 rounds of ammunition.

In their sentencing memo filed earlier, prosecutors said Cornell continued in jail to promote violence, trying to circulate his “Message to America” call for others to “fight against the disbelieving people of America.”Authorities said he was able to circumvent a security program on a jail computer terminal meant for legal research to make internet posts about his Capitol attack plan, to call for others to wage “violent jihad” and to seek retribution against the confidential informant.

A federal judge recently sentenced another suburban Cincinnati man, 22-year-old Munir Abdulkader, of West Chester Township, to 20 years in prison for a plot to behead a military veteran and then attack a police department in support of ISIS.